Disenvowled chapter e (selections) by Christian Bök — inspired by (but not copied from, exactly) Cecil Touchon's procedures outlined at dbqp. Link below. (Very nice.)

Very nice.

The 1970s appear to be within reach, jeans with a slight flare, mustaches, medicinal marijuana. It's a parlor trick we pull off collectively. The 2000s, that's the decade we're about to exit, attach readily to the 20th century. That's because this persists as the unpronounceable, unprecedented decade that wills to fold itself into other time (and let's admit it, the sooner it folds the better for our future). For the moment, the 2000s belong to the past century, the still-tangible, once-thought-progressive hegemony of information-based, meritocratic multiculturalism, advanced by science and the languages of science, programming and English. As for our connection to the past and timelines moving forward, however, it's absurd that the 1980s and 1990s seem within walking distance. They aren't. Within hours the first January of the twenties, starting with 2020, will be closer than January 1998, and the farther back we walk, the colder the blast. The 1970s are several long hikes up and around then down a K2 heap, a product of stylistic and political shifts over four decades, tectonic shifts.

In Milk Sean Penn wears all his decades well. He plays gay community organizer Harvey Milk at age 40 in 1970 moving forward, leaping into prominence toward the end of his life before he is gunned down in his late 40s. The film welcomes us to queer consciousness 101, and it takes us back to the era when gay men and women invented their communities by organizing them, investing livelihoods and their lives to stroll a few city blocks of the Castro alone or together as they are. (Or as they were, few or no gym rats among the boys, women who needed to butt heads with male counterparts just to get cranking, politically.) Director Gus Van Sant produces both a biopic shaped around a singular rebel and a starkly entertaining exposé of communal forces, blending archival film and newsreels with theatrical representation of Milk, younger comrades in arms, and numerous adversaries. It's chilling to view kinescopes of Anita Bryant in her prime declaring her Christian love for gays. Bryant's parallel to our own Rick Warren comes to mind. Similarly shocking, Milk is shown fighting and prevailing against Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative to root out homosexuals in public education, sponsored by national anti-gay forces. Had Milk only lived to present day, he may have made a difference battling last year's Proposition 8 repealing homosexual marriage, funded by Latter-day Saints. Reconsidering Milk today prompts reevaluation of how un-fecklessly and how far from a neutral distance we have come in affording homosexuals rights and respect. After 15 years of one form of such neutrality, only now with the new Obama administration is there the prospect of dismantling official military policy that enforces silence on homosexuals in service, so reevaluation of where we stand is much more than an exercise or academic ideal. Even today when an accomplished straight poet snickers at the idea of seeming gay, we as a community seem unknowingly stuck in the past, in bed with our own adversaries, ourselves. As artifact, Milk brings what has long since passed closer to our time. It's a deception that registers for something more attractive soon.

Dear Barack Obama:

There's a speech watch. It's been building over a few months, as you know, and with one week to go before your inaugural oration it's now calculable. I can't remember when so many — a multitude — will be hanging on rhetoric.

It will be exciting if you keep it short. That's the first order, as it were. And let's hope specifics are kept in tow. A pile-up of details would muddy the occasion. Rather than reach for punch lines, design one or two views into the future, frameworks we might call them. That will be splendid. We're expecting memorable lines, sound-bites that are supposed to be remembered but may not go over. So, keep these to a minimum, please. Or it may be adventurous if you don't even try. Grant us a communitarian and jaw-dropping glimpse of tomorrow to celebrate history. Our place in it. That's all, for now.

Slumdog Millionaire employs three actors apiece to tell the life stories — childhood, adolescence, young adulthood — of three Muslims who grew up in the slums of modern Mumbai. The tale is a convoluted but whole account bubbling up in flashbacks and contemporary frames featuring brutal interrogation, childhood endangerment, and a quiz show, everything gurgling, pulsing exhaustively to a hustle-and-smooch climax — liberty and happiness — in the closing credits. British actor Dev Patel, of Indian descent, plays the post-adolescent Jamal, the hardened but unwavering protagonist who has escaped the megaslum to work as tea-server in a Mumbai boiler room (where phone bashers pitch family plans to housewives in the UK). Jamal winds up, improbably, as a magnetic game show contestant, a huge favorite of the masses watching the Indian TV version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It's providential for Jamal all the questions he's asked on the way to winning his fortune happen to connect to his hard life experiences. It's a narrative gimmick that good writing and directing can begin to bring off. British screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who gave us The Full Monty, re-invents the breakneck pace and violence of the Maharashtra underclass and underworld, along with the faster rhythms of young people who struggle to be winners today, running away from all that. English-Irish director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting) charges his mostly youthful, mostly Indian cast with the humane task of showing restraint in a world with no holds barred, creating an ensemble of players whose emotions and physicality seem to smolder as the story almost goes up in flames. Thank goodness Jamal winds up with Latika, his boyhood love played by the Mangalorean model and TV personality Freida Pinto. More thanks to Boyle's decision to gather these two and the rest of the cast for the film equivalent of a curtain call during credits at the end. Out of their characters, they swagger. Dev Patel, a Taekwondo world champion, and Freida Pinto, an Indian fashion icon, embrace, romp, and trance-freeze over "Jai Ho," a song by A. R. Rahman I translate as "Hell, yeah." Opening lyrics I truncate and adapt here from a literal English translation: "Hell, yeah, I walked on fire and got you. I've lost my life. Hell, yeah."

Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for and last night won all four categories at the Golden Globe Awards, best original score, best screenplay, best director, and best picture (drama).

My girlfriend is ticked.

She's an irate Democrat. And I can empathize with her and Paul Krugman's disdain for the type of stimulus measures Barack Obama outlined yesterday in his speech at George Mason University. It's fair to say, with respect to shifting to the center / center-right, all the signals are flashing olive green — that's flashing for undue, indeed, untoward caution — and that's olive for the color of the branches he's piling up on the GOP side of the aisle. Republicans can never resist a tax cut, and roughly $300 billion of Obama's $600-800 billion stimulus will come as credits to taxpayers and to businesses for new hires. The rest of the stimulus will go for promoting broadband expansion, digital medical record keeping, shovel-ready public works, and quick-fix green initiatives such as new insulation for public buildings. Does that sound like dramatic action? "Obama's plan is nowhere near big enough to fill [the] 'output gap,'" Krugman writes in today's NY Times. (The output gap, according to Krugman, is the difference between national production capacity and what is actually sold.) In other words, what Obama proposes, dealing still in generalities, covers too little ground to move more goods, promote more services, and ameliorate dire economic challenges like 7.2% unemployment hurtling down on us. Most of what Obama wants is familiar turf, tax giveaways, already-proposed public works. Tepid ground, we might say, from the perspective of most unemployed and imaginatively anemic in comparison to more leftwing initiatives once at the top of Obama's wish list, universal health care and green energy R & D, initiatives that will advance both short- and long-term social wellbeing.

To achieve the illusion of bipartisan support for what might be described as stopgap spending writ large, Obama dangles billions of dollars in tax cuts to triangulate a few recent converts to budgetary discipline (read, Republicans) to join his side, but he risks losing more than a few of us who prefer his holding up the wish list now, proposing the big, expensive ideas while public approval is on his side, even if results prove partisan. Democrats can do this if Obama will let them.

Girlfriend and I are holding tight.

Don't know. Find this week's meme, embarrassment, spooky. Anything can be recouped and mined, surely. But isn't it a little belated for chilling anthems and a textual movement motivated by shame, awkwardness, discomfiture, popping zits? Oh, zits. I'm spooked by the half-heartedness and the half-thought-outness.

Jamie Reid praises Billy Little, archivist, publisher, friend of poets, poet.

It's a sign of anarchy when Senate Intelligence Committee higher-ups Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller are summarily reduced in stature by Obama staffers coordinating with junior senators while commentators, such as Rachel Maddow, wield authoritative arguments to support a turnaround at CIA. Never camera shy, Feinstein breathlessly questioned the skills set and lack of Agency experience of director-designate Leon Panetta, once the first word of his likely nomination filtered up from Ron Wyden, a lower ranked member of the Intelligence Committee that Feinstein chairs. With Obama publicly advancing his choice for CIA, firmly defending Panetta in face of criticism, Feinstein backed off her remarks within hours. This case of loose mouth is an embarrassment, since Feinstein's questions about Panetta are posed in the context of her having acceded to current antiterror protocols like severe interrogation methods and rendition. Obama seems to mean it when it comes to upending CIA's pat bureaucracy that looks soft-politico at Langley and roughhouse at the margins (everywhere else). Almost as promising, he seems ready to swat down competing agendas that don't measure up to his forms of anarchy.

Flipping sides, Feinstein's backing of Roland Burris as the appointed senator from Illinois moves her perception game forward, moaning, feisty and, in this instance, correct. Or mostly. She also chairs the Senate Rules Committee and according to her reading there's nothing on the books that would prevent Burris from assuming his seat in the Senate. The only hang-up might be how the Illinois Supreme Court rules with regard to the state secretary's endorsement. The moving parts of the Burris controversy are in Illinois, then, oro forensis. Speaking of the politics here, I'd think Feinstein is ahead of others, a quick rebound from her Panetta blunder.

Back to the perception game, Rachel Maddow is fast becoming the go-to rhetorician to explain and expand on Obama's anarchism. I just love that she's taken possession of the Republican catchphrase elections have consequences in answer to mumblings from right and center. During the presidential election cycle no sensible Republican would submit to her blistering Q & A style. This prompted her to deal nearly exclusively with lefties, first as she guest-hosted on a range of MSNBC shows, and then after she landed her own cable program late in the campaign. Along the way she must have won the trust of Obama's communication staff as she seems often the first and the most eloquent, the most specific re-teller or, ok, spinner of new policies for change. The one-sided conversations during the campaign, enforced by the GOP blackballing her on-air efforts, have worked in her favor, as she has honed lines of argument to an essential brevity that persuades, because her language reflects intelligence staving off cant, engaging with steely particularity.

First there was Barbar. Cretin, evil colonialist, when he donned whiteface, it was time for ridicule and games (l'art populaire). Barbar was distinguished not so much by showmanship as by his underhanded chic (bisexualité que la position de repli). What a big schnazz he had. Then there are the pre-endowed toys of Teletubbies, the BBC's reach-out to the world of rainbows and inflamed proclivities. I fear for any straight child within their fun-house grasp, cuddly, flamboyant balls of sorry-ass perversion.

Now there's Wall-E, a fuming sulfuric potion (confused identity, ambiguous purpose, sex change) poured over robotic operations, mis-tagged as kid's entertainment. The film's original song "Out There" says it out loud, meow! I'm feeling beautiful. Wall-E is a richly empathetic banged-up throwback, a trash compactor (could be from the Jetsons) roving over a de-peopled planet heaped in refuse, stranded in his/its blue-collar routine for 700 years, picking up tossed brassieres and make-up, listening to show tunes (hint, wink), the last employee on Earth. He/it runs from Microsoft Vista. From outer space enters Macintosh Eve, a legless streamlined dedicated gadget floating like a Swedish teardrop over waste. I'm calling it Eve, but name and gender are up for grabs. Wall-E calls it variously Steve, Reeve, Irv. Doesn't matter, Wall-E forces love that dares not speak its name onto it/her/him. Once Wall-E and Eve lift off from Earth, conventions in animation take over. Human beings have repaired to a spaceship that's nearly spotless, The Axiom, and like us they have become fairly relaxed shopaholics, only they're dealing with consequences after seven-plus centuries strapped into Ikea recliners, sipping tall blue colas, suffering bone loss. Little and midsize robots race around and cause panics (if they can). Airlock disposals and other inane contraptions on the big shiny mother ship are controlled by one more throwback, evil Hal. Though it's Hal after the bailout this time and its giant red glow and kinematics module are housed in a flimsy steering wheel. And it's a good thing, too, because when Wall-E and Eve assist the ship's captain (homo sapiens) snapping the wheel off, Hal dies. Humans can now return to their filth-ridden streets back on Earth while Wall-E and Eve run off to live their private desires. Evil. Pure evil.

Looking out, looking on — that's one dynamic that recovery from addiction deals in, a gluttonous, panoptic magnetism that woozily succumbs to cinematic overlapping. The centerfold of Rachel Getting Married is Anne Hathaway as Kym Buchman, sister of the bride. Hathaway emerges from the black-and-white credits self-absorbed, formidably at arm's length yet more darkly shadowed than anyone else in the first key minutes of the film, decamping from nine months of rehab in NYC, looking out from her father's suburban wagon as they speed toward Stamford in a blanched gauze of grays, greens, and doused flames of color. One pit stop for diet Pepsi later — Hathaway refused a diet Coke packed for the commute — the father-expeditor-of-good-feelings played by Bill Irwin (aka Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street) and the needy junkie step onto the wedding set, their mid-19th-century family home, for a weekend of multiple rooms and grounds for looking on as Kym, Rachel, and others' lives take hold. Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel reclaims her father's attention — she's the one getting married, after all — and calls Hathaway down for ruining their past and making light of or fabricating the details to deflect criticism. DeWitt will have none of Hathaway's making 'amends,' and Hathaway cries back, "Who do I have to be now?" Hathaway's question plays out more terrifyingly the closer we come to the wedding and through the ensuing reception and party. DeWitt and Hathaway manage both to kill the music (an aggravating mélange of garage, Brazilian drums, and post-bop performed on screen well before and long after nuptials) and to see and behold the impasse they construct between them, punctuated by their mother's automatic flinches and retreat. The mother, played by Debra Winger, has remarried and arrives late and is among the first to exit the proceedings. It's a radical quality that puts the film viewer in Winger's shoes, arriving late to the de-synthesized catastrophe and needing to leave or at least to look away.

Getting back to dead binaries for the moment, I add Anne Boyer to the short list of bloggers reposing ideas around the six-inch-deep cavity of a vanguard of poets in opposition to them. Over the last two days Anne's method has been to mine sources. Reader, critic and, more infinitely refined, poet, she commences three brief references (three, so far) with Peter Burger's perception of an unresolved collusion between forces of an esthetic binary; then she cites Donald Sutherland's sanguine description of a fortuitous "animating force" in poetics to repurpose "stranded ideas" (ideas, as in concepts) "for another continuum (lyric subjectivity)... a perpetual 'fresh event.'" By round three, Anne turns to Gertrude Stein's song that notes "the little birds are audacious... [even as] they were not able to delight / In which they do." Anne's third reference comes across almost as a suggestion that Burger's skepticism and, more obvious, Sutherland's sanguinity are half-decisions that introduce new problems only a fresh event of poetry, such as Stein's, can demonstrate.

Fearing contact after fucking I found a penknife buried to the hilt in my ribs. The perverted part was how I occupied your emotional life, a joyrider's joyrider. The guardian part made this a better world with a whole splash of blood on my undershirt. It's for you.

~~

There's the sizzle of homeless autosuggestion in sex, climbing in the mist. I'm pointing to the blight of the neighborhood and placing bets, because I bring humor to this relationship, zipping up, looking wild in the frieze. The snow is still on the branches. Why does everything get attended to like a pageant? Why are birds wearing outfits that pay tribute to Neil Diamond?

~~

Before sex I thought about the white fragrance, watching my breath. Let's try it again without the comma it's always been. The whereness on the tip of the tongue. The perfunctory receding of the plane. Inside voices take two bites and want out, taking no steps at all, like freakouts testifying for tangled weaves of standard-bearers.

Binaries are dead. Long live binaries. If poetics-in-progress toward transparency in dissidence is what you think the first of January was invented for, you could do lots worse than Johnannes Göransson and Seth Abramson who both disturb the smooth functioning of The Avant v. The Other. Frankly, discussions like these call out for a Linnaeus sort or sorts, readers and critics equipped to reorganize and redefine the prevailing ditheism into its innumerable and underreported strands. New taxonomies could play a big part in poetics soon. A guess, we'll need a couple of saber-rattling anthologies to kick things off. (And the battle could be joined overnight on the Web!)

At every year's end I find myself plunging into lists, asking questions. What falls over the ditch? What's rotted so ready to lay it down? Fractious midwinter makes room for true snowfall. My greatest wish is to down flakes lost in their way like raisinettes with botulism, spinning machines gone iridescent while sketchy hacking out the details. O drum machines! Music in no order.

Yoga is so popular it's what it is everywhere, even in the bedroom. It's funny that such devastating existentialism is served at a fancy party.

In this one Nancy appears as an ashtray and the cowboys are spying on some other cowboys. Practice makes perfect.

Sometimes a partner can be deliberately and aggravatingly passive-aggressive. I'm kidding. I'm being sarcastic.

In making love, as in all things, "airy" is a terrible consistency for meatballs.

A friend reports they're reading dog waste at MLA.